Why Your Website is Slow

Using website themes on sites like WordPress and Hubspot can be a convenient way to create and manage your website. However, those beautiful themes also carry a lot weight, so to speak.

We’re going to focus on things you can do right now on your website to speed it up! First off, we’re gonna take a peek at your plugins. If you have a large theme with a myriad of features, chances are it has even more plugins. You’re going to want to make sure those plugins are constantly up-to-date and any plugins that you aren’t using should be deactivated.

The next biggest thing to impact your page speed is the combined file size of the page content. Also, large image sizes can negatively impact your speed by a lot. Unless you are a photographer you don’t need to have a billion pixels on your photos. You’d be surprised at how much it will increase the speed of your website.

You’ll want to download any large images and then resize and upload them. A good rule of thumb is to try and keep photos under 400KB and preferably around 200KB. You can do this by changing PNGs (without transparent backgrounds) to JPGs and lowering the dimensions of the photo, the DPI, and the overall image quality (which actually shouldn’t affect the on-screen quality too much).

One other big reason a website can run slow is if there are conflicts with the SSL certificates, and there are a couple things you can do to troubleshoot this. If you’re using WordPress, we recommend a plugin called Really Simple SSL to automatically alter the site files, so you don’t have to worry about it. You can also call your hosting provider and ask them best practices for this.

There are a million reasons why your website is running slow, but unfortunately some are out of your hands. This can include your hosting services if it is a shared hosting service (like many are) and many other factors.